Armor can be obtained through your ship's Weapons Locker component or via Contacts. When armor is provided by the weapon locker, all crew have access to those types of armor in the locker. Armor purchased from Contacts is stored in your ship's inventory and each suit of armor purchased can only be equipped by a single crew member.
If you do not have an armor locker on your ship, and do not have your combat crew fully equipped with contact weapons and armor, your crew will use extremely rudimentary equipment (worse than Level 1!)
Armor's Stealth Dodge grants dice equal to listed value or combatant's Stealth Skill, whichever is lower.
Whenever a character takes damage in a Crew Combat, their Armor may soak some of that damage based on a variety of things.
Deflection
All Weapons have a Piercing score which represents their ability to punch through heavier armor while all Armors have a Deflection score which represents their ability to deflect or absorb damage.
When a character is hit, the attacker's Piercing and target's Deflection are directly compared to see if the attack is Piercing. If the target's Deflection and the attacker's Piercing are equal, there is a 100% chance that the attack will be Piercing. For each point that Deflection is higher than Piercing, that is a 1% reduction in the chance of Piercing.
A piercing hit reduces the average amount of damage soaked by armor by 2/3.
Soaking Values
All attacks are either Ballistic or Impact. Ballistic attacks are made by any ranged weapon in the form of screaming bullets, sniper rounds, burning plasma. Impact attacks are made by any melee weapon in the form of slicing blades, stabbing steel or swinging blunt stunners. Every type of armor has a separate soak value for Ballistic and Impact Damage. All characters also rely heavily on their Fortitude to soak damage during combat.
